Escape from Power by Petzi
* Instructions **
This is a local two-player cooperative game, though you can player it by yourself, aswell. Each player controls one of the rabbits and each rabbit holds controls part of the flying drone: one player aims and the other shoots. It's meant to be played by two players side by side, one using the keyboard and the other the mouse. The controls are in the title screen. You can customize the controls, instructions for that are in the Readme file.
Please leave a comment :)
I wanted to copy the Bungee Buddies minigame from WarioWare: Smooth Moves and add some things into the mix. The idea was to make a game for two players using a single Wiimote-Nunchuk. After a few hours, I realized I was going to spend the entire weekend messing with technical stuff and that even if I succeeded, most of my potential players don't own a Wiimote and a bit of effort is required to connect one to your PC (at least on Windows).
So, I dropped the idea of having the players physically jump. And for the compo, I decided to have it use the keyboard and mouse.
I think it's interesting, but I didn't quite nail it. Despite having spent most of Sunday creating and balancing the difficulty progression, I feel it's too easy for me, so it's ultimately kind of boring. It could definitely use more content, too.
What I learned from making this is that, for this type of game, you need to carefully consider your restraints for generating obstacles. The biggest difficulty I had was with the energy: energy is health and ammo in this game, so how much energy the players receive is what affects the balance most. You need to make sure the game doesn't become unreasonable at any point, but if you don't design your game correctly, it becomes very hard to make sure it's neither too easy nor too hard. I get the feel that there's some crucial design change I need to make to avoid this problem.
Anyway, thanks for reading! I hope you have fun with the game!
UPDATE: You can now customize your controls.




Ratings
| Overall | 489th | 3⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 379th | 3.05⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 325th | 3.1⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 497th | 3.15⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 431th | 2.95⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 396th | 2.579⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 245th | 2.588⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 461th | 2.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
I'm not sure why that is, because I've submitted a GameMaker-game too.
I've also compiled it from source, but no difference.
So unfortunately I can't rate your game as I couldn't play it.
You've made a good effort though!
I don't have a second player with me, so I played alone. Unfortunately my keyboard is not QWERTY but QWERTZ, which made the jumping really awkward.
The idea is really cool and it also works quite well single-player.
You didn't opt out of Audio, but I couldn't hear a sound, so I'm not going to comment on that.
The graphics are pretty good and convey what you're trying to do. I'm surprised you managed to get the collision boxes to be that accurate in the short amount of time. I expected to hit something because the perspective was weird at first.
Overall I like the concept and as you said - you didn't nail it exactly, but it's definitely not bad.
As for the keys, none of them working is pretty strange. But I've added a configuration file so that you can customize the controls, that should mitigate any problems with non-QWERTY keyboards. I didn't bother to include controller or Wiimote support, but if anyone wants to try it, just let me know and I can add it pretty quickly :)
The game does have sound effects, but no music. Again, I don't know what could've caused them to fail :/ Maybe you hit 'M' accidentaly? I guess it has to do with Game Maker.
Thanks for your support, I'm pretty happy with both the graphics and the red drones. The collision boxes were actually pretty easy, all I did was make the fence hitbox be only on the top and have the objects only hit when the player was on specific segments of the jump. After playing it again, I think the game's pretty cool, it's just that it's too easy for most Ludum Dare participants.
The first download link worked fine for me, but the itch.io link doesn't work correctly; it brings me to a 404 page not found error.
I imagine this game would be more fun with a second player. Well Done!
Overall nice game and i look forward to your future ones.
-m
I didn't have a second player here but the game worked rather well as a single player experience too.
But the premise of both players having to control a rabbit and one part of the cannon is pretty cool.
At first i really liked the sound effect of the rabbits jumping, after a while it gets lightly on the nerves though because it is rather long and both players have to jump a lot. Since there is no music you will be hearing that sound effect almost all the time.
The level was surprisingly long with some variation to the enemies. The pink rings seemed a bit more aggressive than the yellow ones, but just as easy. The red ones were really fun to shoot because you had to predict their movement.
I would love to see this game being more developed, getting more enemy variations, maybe different obstacles etc.
Overall it was a lot of fun and a cool new concept, great stuff!
@gonutz Strange, Game Maker games should work on 32 bit machines, from what I researched. Could you post the error you're getting?
@jondalnas I definitely agree, it could be a pretty good game with enough variety :)